


Flaneur

by RainyJane



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), WandaVision (TV)
Genre: Aftermath, Angst, Existential Crisis, F/M, Post-WandaVision
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-12 09:47:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29882721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainyJane/pseuds/RainyJane
Summary: Spoilers for Episode 9: The Series Finale.....He was Vision.He was a sentient weapon.He'd tried to kill the woman he loved.He had some things to work out.
Relationships: Wanda Maximoff/Vision
Comments: 2
Kudos: 24





	Flaneur

**Author's Note:**

> flâneur: (from French) n. idler; one who strolls around in order to get the feel of a place, deliberately aimless

The images swam in his head. His creation, his destruction, thousands of moments in between, many of them involving Wanda.

_Your mission is to kill Wanda Maximoff and the Vision. You resemble the Vision, which will make Wanda reluctant to kill you._

He fled, flying into the sky above the anomaly, then speeding to some nearby woods where he stopped, hidden among trees.

What was he? Dead?

His memories included his death. He'd died twice, the first in an attempt to prevent the alien adversary known as Thanos from obtaining the Mind Stone, the second when Thanos obtained the Mind Stone.

Wanda had killed him.

Wanda loved him.

The look on her face when she destroyed the Mind Stone, the pure anguish.

The look on her face when she'd turned after seeing his reflection in the window.

He had not been able to catagorize her emotions at the time. Even now, their interplay perplexed him, though he believed he could identify them: astonishment, sorrow, guilt, and hope.

_"Vision? Is it really you?"_

He had felt nothing at the sight of her.

_If you approach her in a non-threatening way, she is likely to let you get close enough to her to kill her quickly._

Only when he lifted her off the ground, his fingertips pressing into her fragile skull, had fear appeared in her expression.

_You must kill her as quickly as possible. She is deceptively powerful._

Just as Director Hayward predicted, her emotions for the Vision had rendered her vulnerable.

_"And I was told you were powerful."_

He recognized the affect of his voice resembled what humans called gloating. He felt nothing as he prepared to follow his directive and end her life.

That task had been interrupted by the arrival of the one called Vision.

_It's unlikely you will be able to destroy the Vision until Wanda is neutralized._

He was no longer receiving transmissions from outside, unable to either send status updates or receive them, but it didn't matter. He knew his directive.

The Vision fought with powers identical to his own, his strength equal. The Vision would destroy him if given the chance. If the Vision had strategic processing ability equal to his own, neither of them had an advantage. It was exactly a 0.5 probablility that he would be the own who was destroyed. But he felt no fear.

When the walls of the anomaly began to sputter out, the Vision also began to break down. His energy ray was able to overpower the Vision's, knocking him out of the sky.

The Vision landed in the town square, still disintegrating.

He wondered if he had won.

But Wanda saw the Vision, and two children likewise disintegrating, and stopped whatever she was doing to the anomaly. The disintegration stopped. They clustered together.

He wondered if he could somehow use this to his advantage. Wanda's affection for the Vision was a weakness he had exploited when he first attacked. Might the Vision possess some corresponding weakness?

He noted the arrival of S.W.O.R.D. artillery. They would be helpful in accomplishing the directive. He could leave the destruction of Wanda—who was, according to his observations, much less powerful than they initially feared—to the other humans while he destroyed the Vision.

He flew at them. The Vision counter-attacked, colliding with him in mid-air.

They crashed into a library.

_"Why are you doing this?"_

_"My programming directive is to destroy the Vision."_

They fought, damaging the building and its contents as they did. That was not his directive.

The Vision got him in a headlock, but failed to press his advantage.

_"But I am not the true Vision; only a conditional Vision."_

He phased out of the headlock and flew around to face the Vision, who charged up the energy weapon in his forehead in preparation to continue the fight.

What did he mean that he was only a conditional Vision?

His systems were overloaded; he had no connection to the command center and could not query. If this was not the true Vision, his destruction did not fall under the directive.

And the Vision—or, perhaps, Conditional Vision—was not attacking. Perhaps there was time for clarification.

_"I request elaboration."_

The Vision obliged him.

The Ship of Theseus. A hypothetical thought experiment, but one concretely pertinent to their situation. If he was the reassembled body of the Vision, and the Vision he had been sent to kill was the novel incarnation of Vision's personality, which of them was the true Vision? Neither of them. Both of them.

The Vision hypothesized that intangibles—experiences, memories—were the true self.

_"I do not retain memories."_

_"But you do have the data. It is merely being kept from you."_

Somehow, he knew this was true. He felt in the depths of his hardware vast memory banks he was blocked from accessing.

Why? Why would the director deny him access to his own memories?

_"A weapon to be more easily controlled."_

Was it an objection to being controlled he felt at that realization, or fear? Was he afraid of what he could be ordered to do if he couldn't remember sufficient data to evaluate those orders?

He had to know.

He allowed the Vision, the enemy he had been sent to destroy, to remove the barriers to accessing his memories. It worked instantly. Everything came flooding back. It was too much all at once. He had to take time to process.

Which was what he was doing now, standing motionless in the woods. Through the trees he could see the red energy walls of the Maximoff Anomaly—the thing that _she_ had made, where she had made another version of him, her own, a replacement. Should he be upset by this?

_"Is it really you?"_

He didn't feel upset. He felt nothing. He could remember emotions. He remembered the wild confusion he'd felt as he burst from the Cradle, the compassion for humanity he experienced as he fought to thwart Ultron's attempt to burn the world clean, the rush of love he felt every single time he looked at Wanda, the aching regret at the necessity of having her kill him to save the universe.

But he felt nothing now.

S.W.O.R.D. had been able to resurrect his body, but he was dead inside.

That was perhaps the motivation of the Sokovia Accords Section 36 Subparagraph B, forbidding the reconstruction of a synthetic sentient being in the event of its destruction. Perhaps whoever proposed that stipulation had feared the synthetic being might be brought back online incomplete, corrupted. As he had been the only synthezoid in existence at the time, the section had been written and enacted with him in mind. They had known the risk he posed would be too great if he were brought back wrong.

He had not wanted this either, he recalled. It had always been his greatest desire to participate in humanity as fully as he could. Humans had to face the fact of their own mortality; he had wanted the same. He'd spoken to Wanda about that desire—the hope that he was mortal,—on occasion. She hadn't wanted to contemplate his death, but admitted she also wouldn't want to live forever. She had lost too many people she loved, and if she never died she would keep losing them endlessly.

What now? Now that he had died and been brought back, did he still agree with his initial assessment? He wasn't sure. He had died twice, and it was not an experience he would wish to repeat.

He had tried to inflict that experience on someone else today, had deliberately tried to end someone's entire existence—to snuff out a lifetime of memories, a wellspring of thoughts and experiences, to eliminate all their future possibilities. And it hadn't been just anyone's life; it had been Wanda's.

How could he have done that? Was he now the monster she once feared him to be?

If he saw her again, what would win out: his regard for human life and his memories of affection for her, or his programming directive to kill her?

Suddenly, the boundaries of the Maximoff Anomaly began to contract. He watched for a few minutes, trying to figure out what could be causing it.

He approached to investigate.

He recalled how to phase his clothes and skin to disguise himself as human, and did so. Near the temporary S.W.O.R.D. outpost he saw F.B.I. agents, and he phased a jacket matching theirs, a cap, and dark glasses to try to make himself less recognizable.

As he walked toward the town, he passed a woman walking out of it, seemingly lost in thought. She had dark hair, pale skin, and bright red lipstick. She kept her face down, but he could see her cheeks were streaked with tears.

He pretended not to notice. She didn't look toward him, so his human disguise must have been adequate, but he didn't believe he could disguise the robotic nature of his voice, so he let her pass without a word.

He entered the town of Westview.

People had begun to emerge from their houses, looking around with perplexed or haunted expressions, some sobbing, some making frantic phone calls.

_Wanda has placed the entire town under her mind control. She may endanger innocent civilians in an attempt to protect herself from you. Any collateral damage that occurs in your mission to neutralize her is acceptable._

He saw Director Hayward being lead away in handcuffs by F.B.I. agents. Hayward didn't recognize him.

Vision remembered this town. He had been here before. It had struck him then as peaceful and yet vibrant, idyllic without being shallow.

He had decided on this place to buy a plot of land and build a house. He'd planned on surprising Wanda with it, if she agreed to run away with him. This was where they would have run to, where they would have built a home together.

There were uniformed F.B.I. agents and S.W.O.R.D. agents gathered in the town square. As he walked between them, his enhanced hearing picked up a nearby exchange.

"So far no sign of the reconstructed Vision Hayward sent in," an F.B.I. agent said to a woman in a strange blue and gray uniform.

"Wanda's Vision must have destroyed him. There might not be anything left to find. He could have blasted him to atoms or left him phased underground."

The F.B.I. agent nodded. "And all that's left of Vision is what we recorded of the broadcast. Is it weird that even though I never met him, I feel like I just lost a friend?"

"No, Jimmy. That's not weird. That's being human." She gave his shoulder a squeeze.

Vision continued on his way across the town square.

So his other self was dead. He found that fact unexpectedly disconcerting. Wanda's Vision had spared his life after he had tried to kill him, and by restoring his access to his memories, had freed him of the director's control. Their discussion had been scintillating. They might have been friends. Had they been? Was it possible to forge a friendship from such a brief conversation under such circumstances?

If he had stayed to fight beside him and Wanda, could he have saved his life?

Where was Wanda now?

Phasing the F.B.I. jacket into less conspicuous clothes, he walked through the town, remembering his way to the plot of land he'd bought for Wanda. It was very near where he had first found her.

Where he tried to kill her.

He found only the foundation of the house that had never been built.

There had been a house here. He remembered seeing it when he attacked. Wanda must have made it, just as she made the barrier around the town, the conditional Vision, and the two children he'd seen by their side.

They were all gone now.

He stepped inside the foundation walls, and a realization struck him:

Wanda would never have willingly ended the existence of home, her husband, or her children.

The only conclusion he could reach was that Wanda was dead.

How did it happen? Had she been killed by S.W.O.R.D. agents? By the other enhanced woman he had seen attacking her? By the townspeople once they were released from her control?

Could he have protected her?

Whatever the cause, she was gone. And Vision found he could still feel after all.

He felt like his chest had been torn open.

_"I've always been alone, so I don't feel the lack. It's all I've ever known. I have never experienced loss because I've never had a loved one to lose."_

He stood there, in that empty spot once so full of hopes and dreams.

He stood there, still as a statue, simply existing with the tear in his heart, the jagged pain of love when the object of that love is gone from your world.

He stood there until well after dark, until the town grew silent, then he turned and walked back the way he'd come.

It was easy in the dark dead of night to phase his way into the S.W.O.R.D. lab, and only slightly more difficult to find and make a copy of the observations of the Maximoff Anomaly, including the Broadcast. Perhaps watching it would help him make sense of what had happened, of how and why Wanda made this place, and the other him.

And it was a memento of Wanda. All he had left of her.

In the silence of pre-dawn, he flew away from that place. He chose a random direction and set off. He had nowhere to go.

The F.B.I. would report him as destroyed. No one would be looking for him. He could wander the world in disguise until he figured out what he was, and what he wanted his life to be. He would experience the world and observe humanity in a way he'd never been able to before: alone, anonymous, and in pain.


End file.
